US: Rose Mary Woods, the devoted secretary of President Richard Nixon who erased part of a crucial Watergate tape, has died in Alliance, Ohio, aged 87.
Ms Woods's role was considered crucial in protecting Mr Nixon from direct implication in the Watergate burglary.
In 1973 as the Watergate scandal was unfolding, she confessed she inadvertently erased part of an Oval Office tape that had an 18 ½-minute gap.
The tape was of a June 20th, 1972, conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, and could have revealed what the president knew about the break-in at Democratic headquarters three days earlier, and when he knew it.
Ms Woods spent weeks transcribing subpoenaed tapes of Mr Nixon's conversations in the Oval Office. She testified that the phone rang while she was transcribing one tape and she accidentally hit the record button on the tape recorder and played static over four to five minutes of the recording. No one has even been able to account for the rest of the gap in the tape.
The erasure severely undermined President Nixon's credibility on Capitol Hill, where there was widespread scepticism about his secretary's account.
Ms Woods was always considered one of the most loyal and discreet of Mr Nixon's staff, and after he left office she was treated as a member of his family.
One of five children in a close-knit Irish Catholic family in Sebring, Ohio, Ms Woods worked for Mr Nixon from 1950.
Described by Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken as "intelligent, literate, clamlike in her discretion", she struck up a rapport with her boss because their characters were similar and she was obsessive about privacy.